Mitochondria in the nervous system: From Health to disease, part II

Maria Teresa Carrì, Brian M. Polster, Philip M. Beart, Mitochondria in the nervous system: From Health to disease, part II, Neurochemistry International, Available online 10 April 2018, ISSN 0197-0186, doi:10.1016/j.neuint.2018.04.006.

In Part II of this Special Issue on "Mitochondria in the Nervous System: From Health to Disease", the editors bring together more reviews and original articles from researchers in the field of mitochondrial metabolism in the healthy and diseased nervous system. Subjects span from basic mitochondrial physiology to papers on mitochondrial dynamics and to those altered states of the nervous system that can be considered “mitopathologies”. Finally, a few papers approach aspects of mitochondrial biology linked to the feasibility and validity of a mitochondrial therapy.

The fact that lack of a single protein affects all of these processes supports the concept that they are all interconnected, albeit it is difficult to pinpoint the “primum movens” in the chain of events leading to neurodegeneration. Furthermore, Friedreich's ataxia is another example of a disease where mutations in a gene coding for a ubiquitously expressed protein mostly affect a specific tissue or cell type.

Mitochondria in the nervous system: From Health to disease, part II